The Fallacy of Success

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, or G. K. Chesterton, was an English writer, thinker, critic of art and literature, journalist, and Christian apologist. He was born in May 1874 in London and died in June 1936 in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. As a child, he attended St. Paul’s School in London, and afterward he went to art school instead of college. In 1900, he accepted an invitation to write some articles on art criticism, launching a career spanning over 30 years. He wrote more than 100 books, contributed to twice as many, and dabbled in poems, plays, novels, and short stories, collectively even greater in number. Chesterton is best known for his series of fictional mystery stories involving the amateur detective Father Brown, a Catholic priest who relies on his unassuming demeanor and his understanding of human nature—refined by his experience as a spiritual advisor and confidant—to catch criminals unawares and discern their true motives. Chesterton was a member and president of the Detection Club, a society of detective fiction authors. In his own time, Chesterton was primarily popular because of his journalistic exploits. He wrote thousands of essays—including “The Fallacy of Success”—on disparate topics for the Illustrated London News, the Daily News, and even his own newspaper, G. K.’s Weekly.

Chesterton is also known for his exploration of Christianity as an answer to the human condition in his book Orthodoxy and for his attempted outline of the spiritual evolution of humanity in The Everlasting Man, which contributed to the famous Christian author C. S. Lewis’s conversion. Chesterton was an apologist—a defender of Christianity generally and later Catholicism particularly. During his life, he enthusiastically debated many notable individuals who held various modern, secular, humanistic philosophies, including the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, the English writer H. G. Wells, and the British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell. Chesterton examined and argued against the socialistic, relativistic, materialistic, and skeptical ideas of these thinkers with wit and civility, such that even his opponents found it impossible to hate him.

Chesterton wrote with a distinct style. He has been called a champion of common sense and the “Prince of Paradox,” epithets which concisely convey the character of his writing. He was clever but not pretentious, humorous but not cynical, paradoxical but not absurd, deliberative but not dull, moralizing but not condescending, playful but not trivial, poetic but not vague, confident but not self-aggrandizing. Chesterton was a journalist first and foremost, not an academic, and he wrote for the masses, not for intellectual cliques. He had an unfavorable perspective on higher culture. In his essay “Woman,” also included in All Things Considered, Chesterton asserts, “The higher culture is sad, cheap, impudent, unkind, without honesty and without ease” (5). In “The Fallacy of Success,” this idea of The Complexity of Falsehood and the Modesty of Truth serves as subtext to his basic argument. Chesterton himself wrote in ordinary language about ordinary topics—Christmas, phonetic spelling, fairy tales, etc. He consciously embraced the mundane, the everyday, and the unexceptional—in other words, those things that constitute most of human experience. Higher culture with its exclusiveness was profane to him, whereas the totality of God’s creation, filled to the brim with ordinary things, was sacred.

Chesterton explains this reigning paradox of his writing in his essay “Spiritualism,” also included in All Things Considered. In brief, he argues that any serious idea, philosophy, or religion must be universal in scope. Yet the universe is full of plain and comic things. Therefore, he writes:

It is the test of a responsible religion or theory whether it can take examples from pots and pans and boots and butter-tubs. It is the test of a good philosophy whether you can defend it grotesquely. It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it (2).

Though Chesterton discusses politics, religion, philosophy, and other “serious” subjects, he does so in a backward manner: He chooses to glimpse what is big by gazing at anything small. In his essay “Limericks and Counsels of Perfection,” Chesterton remarks,

It is customary to remark that modern problems cannot easily be attacked because they are so complex. In many cases I believe it is really because they are so simple. Nobody would believe in such simplicity of scoundrelism even if it were pointed out (1).

Yet pointing out plain villainy or foolishness is precisely what Chesterton often sets out to do—his direct criticism of certain authors in “The Fallacy of Success” is such a crusade.